The Return of the Dust Bowl
Not just a piece of history
...Dust...
In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees.
— John Steinbeck, “The Grapes of Wrath”
Riding the Rails
Migrant Mother
Dorthea Lange
A Family in Poverty
The Dust Bowl of the Dirty Thirties
The Dust Bowl was not necessarily a thing of the past. Unfortunately for Americans today, this horrible tragedy may soon be a reality. One reason is because one of the largest bodies of water used to irrigate the majority of farming land is being depleted quickly. “Water drawn from the Ogallala Aquifer is used to water more than 15 million acres of crops. Without this source of water, the United States would not be the breadbasket of the world,” (The Economic Collapse). Another reason a second dust bowl may affect the U.S. is because a severe drought has become common in the farming regions of America. “Secondly, drought conditions have become the "new normal" in many areas of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and other states in the middle part of the country,” (TEC).